The Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Income Tax department has issued refunds worth Rs 64,700 crore in the current fiscal, and for the entire 2018-19 fiscal the amount released was over Rs 1.61 lakh crore.
Over 6.49 crore electronic returns were submitted for the assessment year 2018-19 (the financial year 2017-18), up 18.65 percent from over 5.47 crore in assessment year 2017-18, she said, in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.
“The government has accorded high priority to issue refunds for all taxpayers including small taxpayers. Less than 0.5 percent of income tax returns (ITRs) are selected for scrutiny, the majority of ITRs are processed expeditiously and refunds are issued. With the increased use of technology the time taken to process ITRs are constantly reducing,” Sitharaman said.
The refund of Rs 64,700 crore have already been issued till June 18 for this financial year and over Rs 1.61 lakh crore of the total amount of refund was released in the financial year 2018-19.
Sitharaman said that 26.9 crore SMS and emails were sent to taxpayers in 2018-19, reminding them to file their ITRs on time.
In January 2019, the Government had approved the integrated e-filing and Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) 2.0 project of the I-T department to process returns in a timely manner, the Finance Minister said.
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